Thursday, July 2, 2015

While Cuba’s environment may still be "pristine" as The Times describes it (ignoring the deplorableenvironmental recordof Cuba’s chief subsidizer, the Soviet Union), Cubans still frequently experience food shortages, lack of access to electricity and poor health care.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

A week after he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama went on a road trip to Portland, Maine, to boast and prevaricateabout what he had just done.

"So now that this bill is finally law and all the folks who have been playing politics will finally have to confront the reality of what this reform is, they're also going to have to confront the reality of what it isn't," said Obama, introducing a lie that has gotten belated, but much-deserved, attention in recent days.

"They'll have to finally acknowledge that this isn't a government takeover of our health care system," he said.

"They'll see that if Americans like their doctor, they will keep their doctor. And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn't happened yet. It won't happen in the future."

"Anyone who actually read the law, or even just a small part of it," Jeffrey counters, "would have known this was untrue."

By way of contrast, "in his first press conference as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan, who would lead the West to victory in the Cold War, startled the liberal press when he accurately described the mendacity of the leaders of the Soviet Union, who were seeking a 'one-world socialist or communist state'," Jeffrey continues.

Monday, October 7, 2013

When you can’t beat them, join them. That’s what the Soviet Union did to curtail Christianity’s anti-communist influence.

In a new book titled Disinformation, a covert campaign to discredit Pope Piux XII is revealed. In addition, the Soviets tried to influence the church with a Marxist-friendly version of Christianity.

The communists’ strategy against the church had three pillars: A propaganda offensive; the implanting of agents of influence, and the promotion of Liberation Theology, an anti-Western spin on scripture.

Disinformationis written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc defector, and Ronald Rychlak, Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi. A related documentary has also been released, titled Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West. They disclose how a primary target of Soviet "active measures" was Pope Pius XII.

The third leg promoted an "anti-capitalist, anti-Western brand of Christianity," Mauro writes. "If the KGB could not eliminate Christianity, it reasoned it might as well manipulate it. Liberation Theology was born."

According to Mauro, "Pacepa recallshearing Khrushchev say in 1959, 'Religion is the opiate of the people, so let’s give them opium.' He flatly says that Liberation Theology is 'KGB-invented.' He has first-hand knowledge of secret Romanian agents being dispatched to Latin America to spread it among the religious masses."

Using Showalter's headings and some of my own, those patterns are as follows:

1. Ends Justify the Means: "In setting off civil war, Lenin put Russia on a war footing that justified any atrocity, broken promise or use of propaganda that served to establish communism."

2. Perception of Power: "As early as 1903, at a party congress, Lenin won a membership issue by a single vote. But from then on he called his faction 'the Bolsheviks,' or majoritarians, and his opponents 'Mensheviks,' or minoritarians. It didn't matter that the Bolsheviks never were a true majority among Russia's revolutionaries; what mattered was the perception of power."

3. Media Monopoly: "Lenin simply closed other papers, leaving only the Bolshevik publications. The resultant monopoly intensified the impact of his Bolshevik message, according to historian Robert Service."

4. Demonization: "In denouncing opponents, Lenin was obsessive, virulent and personal, calling them 'bloodsuckers,' 'insects,' 'spiders,' 'leeches' and 'vampires.' . . . But Lenin rarely made such statements in public. . . . In public, Lenin wanted to be pictured as a jolly apostle of Marxism."

5. State Terror on the Innocent and the Guilty: "'We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more,' wrote Lenin's commissar for justice."

6. Blame Your Predecessor: "As happened anytime socialism ever had been tried, it was a failure. Lenin's much-desired civil war cost 13 million lives and his ruinous economic policies triggered the famine of 1921-1922. YouTube has many videos of Lenin speaking, with the salient feature being his propensity to blame his predecessor, the Czar, for the economic havoc."

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

All I wanted to do last week was enjoy my vacation. Instead, I was assaulted by another breathtaking statement from the president of the United States, provided courtesy of an official White House press release. The occasion was a July 25 meeting between President Obama and the leader of communist Vietnam. Obama stated: "President Sang shared with me a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. And we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson."

This, of course, is utter nonsense. Ho Chi Minh was a committed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who cut his teeth at Moscow’s Lenin School. He became one of the Soviet Comintern’s most successful agents. Among the testimonies to his efforts are the countless boat people from Vietnam who now live in America (many of whom voted for Obama).

"But not only is Obama’s statement nonsense," Kengor writes, "it’s also the product of communist propaganda." For example:

In 2010, I published a book called Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. There, I shared numerous lines cooked up by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to dupe liberals. One of them was precisely the line Obama echoed on July 25. CPUSA and its mouthpieces regularly compared Ho Chi Minh to the American Founders, claiming he was fighting for the ideas not of the Bolshevik Revolution but of the American Revolution. This line was employed constantly, and it worked magically with wide-eyed liberals. . . .

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Monday was the 43rd celebration of Earth Day, an event hailed as an effort to promote responsible stewardship of the environment. Fittingly, it is also the birthdate of Communist Party creator Vladimir Lenin, a reality that the radical environmentalists responsible for the creation of Earth Day dismiss as a mere coincidence. Yet there is little question that under the guise of "saving the planet," the earth-firster crowd would be more than willing to impose the same kind of totalitarian control over the masses envisioned by Lenin.